European union

The familiar should be a consolation amid the terrible novelties of COVID-19, but the pandemic’s effects on the European Union threaten to turn familiar fiasco into dangerous novelty. As a weakened Angela Merkel faces Germany’s crisis of economic responsibility, and France floats the idea of issuing its own ‘corona bond’, the EU and its currency face what Emmanuel Macron would probably not want to call its Waterloo.Henry Kissinger’s remark — ‘Who do I call if I want to speak to Europe?’ — has never seemed more true. Britain is leaving.

Is Boris Johnson approaching a Brexit breakthrough? That’s the question being asked among Conservative Members of Parliament after there appeared to be movement last week from the government and Democratic Unionist party that could help to secure a deal with the European Union. Today the prime minister met with EU Commission president Jean Claude Juncker in Luxembourg to discuss the prospect, over a lunch of chicken oysters and risotto. On the conclusions of the meeting, a No. 10 spokesman said the pair had agreed to step up discussions and for Michel Barnier and Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay to hold talks on a political level: ‘The leaders agreed that the discussions needed to intensify and that meetings would soon take place on a daily basis.

For all its ferocious momentum, Boris Johnson’s government is capable of making pretty bad mistakes – as we saw with Priti Patel’s announcement that free movement of people will end with Brexit on October 31. This is a massive problem, if it hasn’t worked out what regime will replace it. As I say in this week’s UK cover story, this decision plunged millions of European Union nationals into uncertainty. The Home Office has only managed to process one million of the three million living in the country. And what would happen to the other two million on October 31? If they change jobs, how would a French baker who has lived here for 30 years distinguish himself from a French baker just off the ferry if he starts a new job?

Last night, during his entertaining slugfest with Jeremy Hunt, his rival for Number 10, Boris Johnson promised to take Britain off the 'hamster wheel of doom.' I thought it was the best line of the night. Judging from the applause, the audience did, too. I should acknowledge that Boris was somewhat parsimonious about exactly what mechanism he intended to employ to effect the announced emancipation. But about two of the evening’s chief issues — Brexit and Britain’s relations with the United States — Boris really didn’t need details. He needed, and demonstrated, determination. The Sir Humphreys of the world hate Boris, and they hate Brexit.

Dr Johnson, who was right about so many things, was certainly correct about London: when a man is tired of London, he said, he is tired of life. I have been in that great metropolis for the last few days and I am once again impressed by the truth of Johnson’s declaration. Not for the first time, however, I find myself asking myself why I am so impressed. Plenty of other cities have conspicuous charms. Paris, for example, is in many ways more beautiful and picturesque than London, more patently sensual, not to say sybaritic. New York is more virile and commanding. But London, for a Yankee like me, exercises a special fascination. One of these days I will sit down and try to plumb the lineaments of that fascination.

No one wants to hear a lecture on ‘liberty and democracy’ from a finance guy turned technocrat. Especially not at a service commemorating the dead of the D-Day landings. In the last 30 years, finance guys and technocrats have enriched themselves at the voters’ expense, abused the notion of economic liberty, and wrecked social contracts across the West. Thank you for your service, as the voters never say. The 75th anniversary of D-Day should be a time for remembering the true meaning of freedom and democracy — and for honoring the thousands of young men who died in foreign fields so that we might inherit those privileges. Instead, we got Emmanuel Macron’s side-eyed hectoring of Donald Trump at Thursday’s memorial service.

Polite British eurosceptics still insist that Brexit isn’t Trump and Trump isn’t Brexit — as if that meant anything at all. Many of us Britons like to think that our populist revolt is a more civilized affair than the one happening across the Atlantic. As London prepares to welcome President Trump next week, it may be time for the British to admit that we have been deluding ourselves. The truth is that Trump is the sun to the Brexit moon. Some mysterious cosmic magnetism always seems to pull them together. Nigel Farage might call it destiny. Look at recent history. On June 24, 2016, the day after the EU referendum, Donald Trump arrived by helicopter at Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland.

Since becoming leader six years ago Matteo Salvini — Il Capitano as they call him — has transformed the radical-right Lega from small regional separatist party into the largest party in Italy. After last week’s European elections, the Lega is now also the second largest national party in the European Parliament. Its 28 seats place it level with Angela Merkel’s CDU, and just behind the 29 seats of Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. The European Parliament election results confirm Salvini as the undisputed leader of Europe’s populists. Their insurrection is determined to unseat the EU ancien régime. Its latest champion, French president Emmanuel Macron, is ever less convincing and popular in France and elsewhere in Europe.

Pavlos Eleftheriadis is as Anglophilic a Greek as they come. His wife and children are British, and he is a professor of public law at Oxford. But the prospect of Brexit has altered Eleftheriadis’s view of Britain. ‘Psychologically, it’s difficult to accept that half of the society you live in is against the presence of Europeans,’ he says. ‘This came out very strongly, including from the prime minister herself. She said we have to stop the free movement of workers from Europe. It’s her primary objective. This wounds you. You wonder why they say this and what led them to it.’ Eleftheriadis says that he’s never seen a hint of racism or prejudice in professional life. But he’s hedging against the attitudes of the next generation.

As Americans will recall, escaping the arbitrary power of an empire can take years. Now imagine doing it with the French being actively obstructive, George Washington committed to paying the taxation and doing without the representation for a period to be determined by George III, and Washington, having lost the support of his closest advisors, now asking Lord North for help. This is pretty much where Theresa May’s government finds itself after this week’s double defeat in the House of Commons. These are only the latest in an apparently endless sequence of humiliations. There are more to come, but no one knows where they will come from, or when. Frankly, it’s humiliating to have to explain how we got here from the 2016 referendum. But here we are.

Late last night, there was a sense of optimism among British government ministers that Theresa May’s revised deal might have a chance of passing. But those hopes were crushed this morning by Attorney General Geoffrey Cox’s blunt legal advice. With Cox declaring that the legal risk was unchanged, the Democratic Unionist Party were never going to back the deal. That in turn meant the bulk of the Brexiteers in the European Research Group wouldn’t either. In the end, the withdrawal agreement went down by 149 votes — at the worst end of expectations. ‘I profoundly regret the decision that this House has taken tonight,’ May said upon defeat.